“I found in working with writers that sometimes it’s actually really hard to even identify your own values as a writer, because we’re not accustomed to doing that.”
In January 2023, Helen Betya Rubinstein’s article “Against Copyediting” appeared on Literary Hub and caused a stir in the online copyediting community. In May 2023, I talked with Helen about the aftershocks.
Outside the Book: Many of the responses reflected cursory attention to the article, which didn’t call for completely abolishing copyediting. Your definition of useful copyediting is “basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends.” Can you say more about that?
Helen Betya Rubinstein: I worked as a copyeditor such a long time ago, from 2005 to 2010, but my life since then has mostly been teaching and writing. It’s largely my experience as a writer — working with editors of different kinds, not just copyeditors — that made me really long for a conversation between editors and writers.
In my practice now, as a coach, which is something I’ve been doing for the past five years, I try to make most of the work happen in conversation.
With copyediting in particular, my dream vision, in addition to the things that I mentioned in the article, is something like a conversation that happens between an author and the copyeditor before the copyediting happens, where the author names some of their values as a writer.
And a lot of the work that I try to do now is values driven, and I found in working with writers that sometimes it’s actually really hard to even identify your own values as a writer, because we’re not accustomed to doing that.
So being able to identify them, to say what you want in a copyeditor, and also — in a totally ideal dream world — being able to understand the larger systems and structures that inform your values, because I think some people come in there saying, “Well, I just want to be respected,” but not really thinking about where respect comes from and what they mean by that. So: informed statement of values, a copyeditor who puts those values first — before, maybe, the publisher’s values, before social values — and then does the work.
My dream vision is a conversation that happens between an author and the copyeditor before the copyediting happens, where the author names some of their values as a writer.
OTB: In corporate communications, there’s never room for that type of — well, especially if you’re freelancing — communication between the author and the editor, as far as discussing assumptions and values. It’s more like we’re all jumping to a “middle value” and not interrogating that at all. Do you have any thoughts on how that plays out in book publishing, which is your lens, and maybe corporate communications or business writing?
HBR: I don’t know how it plays out in corporate communications and business writing. Although I’ll say after that article was published, I had a super-interesting conversation with someone who runs a transcription service. She was talking with me about how this comes into her work — which totally hadn’t even occurred to me — and what a huge difference it is to watch someone’s language being transcribed by someone who shares their background versus someone who doesn’t and how very different those transcriptions will turn out. Some of her work is used in a corporate context.
OTB: A lot of editors will say that they respect the author’s voice, and I think that comes across more with fiction. But what if just the act of writing, “performing a culture,” changes the voice before the author even gets to you, you know?
HBR: I think it really varies. Sometimes I feel like a broken record because I talk about these two articles so much. I mentioned them in that essay. One of them is Lee Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address,” where he’s writing in Hawaiian pidgin, and then there’s Vershawn Ashanti Young’s piece “Should Writers Use They Own English?” where he’s code meshing between AAVE [African American Vernacular English] and conventional English and some text language, and just mixing it up.
And both of those pieces are so interesting to teach and talk through with my students. They’re both nonfiction and they’re both scholarly articles that are written in nonstandard Englishes, but they’re also *about* writing and nonstandard English. So I don’t know what it looks like when you submit a scientific article in AAVE, for instance.
One thing that I think about from a copyediting lens is Tonouchi very clearly establishes that he’s writing from one grammar; he’s using Pidgin. So a copyeditor could go through and say, “OK, in your orthography of Pidgin, this is how you spell that word. That’s how you spell this word.” But Young is literally mixing things up, so he’s going to spell things one way in this paragraph and one way in that paragraph. I feel like copyeditors would just really struggle with that. There isn’t space for that kind of dynamics within a single piece.
OTB: There was a lot of pushback about implicating the copyeditor in this larger system, and a lot of copyeditors would say, “Well, that’s *other* editors. People who aren’t good editors make these kinds of mistakes, or people who aren’t good editors go too far or are power hungry.” Do you think that a “good” editor can make these same mistakes or be a part of this White supremacist practice, as it is?
HBR: For sure, and even in my coaching practice, I’m sure I’ve fucked up sometimes too, even though I try so hard to only be directed by the writer. I think it’s really hard to be in a position of power — I mean, the editor-writer relationship is complicated, but it tends to feel to the writers as though the editor is in the position of power, even if [the editor is] “serving” the writer or that’s how they think of themselves.
I talked to a copyeditor after that piece was published who said she feels like she has to mark everything, and even if she expects that a writer is going to want to stet something, she has to flag every little deviation from convention to please her employers. So, essentially, to keep her job. That’s where it becomes really obviously structural, and you wonder, “Can there be more conversations between the copyeditors and the publishers they’re working for?” Then you start thinking about these cultures of urgency or scarcity, where we don’t have time to have those conversations, and how that makes the structural problems worse. It’s all very entangled.
These cultures of urgency or scarcity, where we don’t have time to have those conversations, make the structural problems worse.
OTB: Right. So what do you say to an editor who says, “Well, you know, I’m just a facilitator. I just do the thing that the company asks me to do. I can’t change publishing standards”?
HBR: That goes back to this conversation I have with students about the Tonouchi article. A lot of students read it and they are like, “Wow, that was very cool. It blew my mind.” Sometimes they start reading it having no respect for it and end having so much respect for it. Then I ask them, “Now that you’re aware, you have a choice. Which English do you want to write in?” I often frame it like your home English or your school English or something like that. Students almost always want to write using the conventions of scholarship and are afraid to turn away from that, which, again, in the structure of higher education, makes sense. But I think — there’s a line in his piece about the status quo: someone has to resist the status quo somewhere. It’s worth editors talking with writers about.
OTB: Further on changing the status quo, for example, in corporate communications — what would be your initial reaction if, say, you got a note from your credit card company in the mail and it was written like Tonouchi’s article? It’s all about legitimacy, right?
HBR: I also try to teach students — because I teach research — how to know when you can trust an article, and one of the criteria is: Does it seem like someone copyedited it? [We both laugh.]
Some of the comments you were referring to I’m not sure I saw, like the one about misogyny. But there was an article responding to my article on Editorial Services Website [Editorial Arts Academy]. That person was saying something a lot of editors said, which is just that “I already am paying attention to the author’s voice” kind of thing. That’s great, but I also feel like that defensiveness about the work isn’t the position that copyeditors should be in if they can help it. I totally understand why the clickbait-y title of the piece would lead people to enter it with a different stance, but I think anything other than defending the way that we already are doing things or that we have always done things seems like a more like progressive, world-changing orientation.
OTB: The phrase that jumps out from your article, to me, is “eagerly transgressive,” and I thought, “None of us are. No, we’re in a conservative profession. None of us are being eagerly transgressive.”
HBR: It’s definitionally conservative.
The thing that called out to me the most was the hostility toward the article.
OTB: The feedback about misogyny was a comment under a reposting of the article. Though some of this is just statistics — for example, that editors are usually women — the characterizations around that, maybe, got in the way for a lot of readers. I think that they kind of jump back like, “Wait a minute!” You know?
One commenter, addressing another commenter, said, “We are all on the same side, here. If you’re actively allying with diversity and consciousness, reading an article about structural racism in our practices shouldn’t upset you. The disservice is reading this article and only coming away with the idea that you are on the opposite side of the author” [Korra Saqqara, Mastodon]. The thing that called out to me the most was the hostility toward the article. Did you have any thoughts about that? People were really pissed off.
HBR: It was astonishing to me. I thought that that article was just going to be a blip that nobody really paid attention to, and the Wall Street Journal excerpted several paragraphs of it. Nobody told me before that happened, and then I woke up on Monday morning and I had all these ridiculous emails from White supremacists. I was mainly just like, “I can’t believe that people are paying attention to this,” and then I was talking to my editor at UNO [University of New Orleans Press], who I had worked with on this piece, because I wrote it to be a part of this book I’m working on. She said, “That exactly proves your point.” Language becomes this place where people have so much anxiety and I don’t know what to call it.
OTB: Identity …
HBR: Yeah, it’s like a hot spot for these real social concerns. So that reaction is amazing. It’s like everybody’s a copyeditor on the inside, I guess.
OTB: Yes! On the Books Uncovered podcast, you said you wish you had mentioned a few things in the article about your experience with editors and other friends of yours who were people of color — their experience with it. Is there anything else that you would have liked to include?
HBR: Yeah, these are the things, hopefully, that will be published in the book. I’m going to try not to give you my whole laundry list, but let’s start with framing the article in a way that shows that there is a turn at the end. It starts off really reactionary against copyediting and then sort of softens or examines its own prejudice against copyediting. So it would be cool to flag that from the start, and to name more of the radical copyediting, conscious editing stuff that I found in the research for the article.
I just couldn’t find a place in this [article], but I think there ought to be a place to talk about pronouns and queer grammars and transphobia and how long it took to get “they” as a nonbinary pronoun into the dictionary.
Since the article’s publication, I’ve also thought a lot about the tendency to read metaphor, or equivalence, online. One copyeditor of color tweeted in anger at the article’s positioning one department of corrections in relation to the other, which was something I’d been nervous about before publishing. What he read as metaphor, however, I really meant to be read as something more like inheritance: the “department of corrections” at publishers as a small branch of a tree that begins with the larger and more obviously violent state department of corrections. I’d like to be clearer about that too.
One big thing: I feel like I need to address my own positionality more. My dad is an immigrant from the Soviet Union, and growing up with him both speaking with a pretty thick accent and writing in all kinds of error-filled ways really impacted my approach to this in a complicated way. I have very much witnessed the discrimination that he faces while speaking and while writing, because of how he speaks and writes, and I adore his voice and want to find ways for it to be preserved and legitimated. I’ve seen the ways that — because he was a professor — his scholarship both managed to get through anyway and was hampered by his accent.
OTB: We didn’t talk about White supremacy specifically, but anytime you associate something … copyeditors are having trouble distinguishing themselves from the system or themselves as copyeditors from systemic problems in publishing. Did you have any final thoughts about people’s reaction to being associated with White supremacy, even though White supremacist culture is all around us?
HBR: That’s part of why I am surprised by that [the reaction to the article] — I guess, because I live in a bubble where it’s normal to talk about that and be aware of it. But, of course, on the internet it’s different.
Leave a Reply